I'd love to try to make a complete, well rounded web-based pet game in a style similar to Neopets. I imagine that the development of the foundation for such a website would be relatively straightforward. But I'm not an artist or graphics designer, and I'm not made of money so it would definitely be a community project.
First, let's talk about layout, flow and maneuverability.
My idea is to design the website inside of a Web 2.0 hub with AJAX that can be used to navigate the entire website from a central location.
- The hub can be thought of as a page that loads only once, a frame that surrounds the game content. The hub frame includes your account information (pet status, friends, currency, etc).
- The user can access every area of the website with ease by utilizing a series of categorical drop down menus within the hub, or through a contextual search feature(?).
- When the user clicks a link to navigate to another page, the page is loaded in the frame in the middle of the hub.
- The use of a central hub for the game will reduce load times and server stress. AJAX optimization will further reduce server stress and latency.
Now, what about features.
Neopets is a feature-rich website, I'm not going to try to convince you that it would be easy to duplicate (and perhaps improve upon) everything Neopets has to offer. It would in fact take years and be a huge, complex task. But it's not impossible.
To begin with feature development, we need to focus on core functionality.
- Triple currency system - Free, Premium and Promotional currencies. They need to be easy to understand and relate to.
- Pet ownership - Nothing special, just simple pets for now.
- Inventory system - Baseline (your main inventory), bank deposit box and the ability to add additional inventory systems.
These three features are required for the foundation of the website. Additional features can only be added when these three features have been developed, so it's best to avoid speculation of additional features for now.
There's a few other issues that need to be addressed but this is a good start.
Edited by leptooners, 26 January 2015 - 12:24 AM.